Aric Jenkins

White nationalists have been empowered not only by the presidency of Donald Trump but also by the rise of the “digital communications revolution,” Washington Post columnist and former TIME editor-at-large David Von Drehle told TIME editor Nancy Gibbs at an event Thursday.

Von Drehle, who was interviewed by Gibbs at the Chautauqua Institution in southwest New York state, said that today’s generation is living in “world historical times” that served as the backdrop for last weekend’s violent clashes between white nationalists and counter-protestors in Charlottesville, Va. “The United States is a wonderful, open, loving country, but we’ve always had people who live in the United States who don’t fit that description,” Von Drehle said when asked by Gibbs how he approached writing about Saturday’s violence, which left one dead and more than a dozen others injured. “It’s been difficult for those folks to find each other and organize.

“[But] today, those same folks can communicate instantly and all day long,” Von Drehle added. “They can amplify each others prejudices and notions and they can easily organize each other’s events.”

Throughout the hour-long conversation, Von Drehle and Gibbs touched upon the power of the Internet and its role and impact on contemporary journalism — particularly in the age of President Trump. Gibbs pointed out that there has been a “journalistic challenge over the past five days” because “the President has doubled-down on many of the things that he has been criticized for.”

“What we hope for in a time like this is national leadership — especially the President of the United States — that can frame [Charlottesville] in a way that’s less terrifying, less divisive, and reaffirm the core principles of the United States,” Von Drehle said. “What I missed last week was that.”

Gibbs said there was an “extraordinary disconnect” because despite the turbulence of Trump’s presidency and a national spike in “diseases of despair” such as alcoholism and opioid addiction, “we’re living in a period of extraordinary technological innovation and the longest uninterrupted period of peace since the Roman empire.

“A generation of optimists say that we are living in the greatest period to be alive ever in human history,” Gibbs added.

“Nancy’s always been the most optimistic person I know,” Von Drehle said to laughter in the audience. “I think there’s a real hunger for that — there’s always a hunger for tomorrow and what the next challenge is.”

Bannon on Tuesday called journalist Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of left-wing publication The American Prospect, telling him to “forget” the possibility of warfare with North Korea during a wide-ranging interview.

“There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it,” Bannon said. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

Bannon’s comments appeared to contradict President Donald Trump’s comments last week in which he warned that North Korea would “be met with fire and the fury like the world has never seen” should it continue to threaten the United States.

Bannon added that the U.S. is at “economic war with China,” though he would consider a deal with China to remove American troops from the Korean peninsula in exchange for China freezing North Korea’s nuclear program. But since Bannon feels such an agreement would be unlikely, he has been campaigning for the Trump administration to take a stricter stance on trade with China.

“To me, the economic war with China is everything,” Bannon said. “And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”

“We must stand together and reject racism, bigotry, and prejudice, including the hateful ideologies promoted by neo-Nazis, the KKK, and all other white supremacy groups,” McCaul wrote. “They do not define who we are as Americans and their repulsive values must not be allowed to infect our neighborhoods and spread violence in our communities.”

Leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center have been invited to participate in the hearing, McCaul said in the letter.

The Texas Republican wrote to Thompson in response to a letter he and other Democrats penned Tuesday requesting a committee hearing on the matter. “It is past time for this Committee on Homeland Security to act,” the Democrats wrote.

Saturday’s clash between white nationalists and anti-racism counter-protestors left three dead, including a woman who was killed when a man allegedly participating in the rally drove a car directly into a crowd of opponents. Two state troopers who were monitoring the rally died in a helicopter crash.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday doubled down on his belief that “both sides” were to blame for the violence. His statement drew swift condemnation from Democrats and Republicans alike.

The mayor of Richmond, Va. — the capital of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War — announced Wednesday that a commission formed earlier this year to add context to Confederate statues will discuss their outright removal from the city’s historic Monument Avenue district.

“Effective immediately, the Monument Avenue Commission will include an examination of the removal and/or relocation of some or all of the confederate statues,” Mayor Levar Stoney said in a statement, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The 10-person commission, established in June with the help of community leaders, academics and historians, originally intended to study what to do with the Confederate monuments, which have been increasingly scrutinized following Dylann Roof’s 2015 killing of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church in order to “start a race war.”

“While we had hoped to use this process to educate Virginians about the history behind these monuments, the events of the last week may have fundamentally changed our ability to do so by revealing their power to serve as a rallying point for division and intolerance and violence,” Stoney said in the statement.

Richmond’s commission will debate Monument Avenue’s statues with community members at a public hearing on Sept. 13, the Times-Dispatch reports. Stoney, while noting the importance of public discourse in the matter, made his stance clear.

“I personally believe they are offensive and need to be removed,” he said in the statement. “But I believe more in the importance of dialogue and transparency by pursuing a responsible process to consider the full weight of this decision.”

More than a decade after the infamous disappearance of Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old from Alabama who was vacationing in Aruba, her father may have broken the case wide open after discovering human remains on the Caribbean island.

Dave Holloway, with the help of private investigator T.J. Ward, uncovered the remains in an unspecified location on the Dutch territory after an 18-month investigation, the men announced Wednesday on The Today Show. Now, they are awaiting the results of a DNA test to confirm whether or not the remains are Natalee’s.

“When we determined these remains were human, I was shocked,” Holloway told Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie. “I know there’s a possibility this could be someone else, and I’m just trying to wait and see.”

Natalee went missing in May 2005 during the trip with her friends to celebrate their high school graduation. The case, which garnered widespread media attention, was never solved and no one to this day has ever been charged in her disappearance. Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch man Natalee was last seen with outside of a popular tourist restaurant, remains the prime suspect — particularly after he was convicted and sentenced to 28 years in prison for the killing of Peruvian business student Stephany Flores Ramírez in 2010.

Holloway said that an informant referred to as “Gabriel” tipped him and Ward off to a contact who claimed to have direct knowledge of Natalee’s disappearance.

“We have a person who states he was directly involved with Joran van der Sloot in disposing of Natalee’s remains,” Holloway said. “I thought, you know, there may be something to this.

“We’ve chased a lot of leads and this one is by far the most credible lead I’ve seen in the last 12 years,” he added.

The results of the DNA test will be known within several weeks to a month, Holloway said. He told Today that he hopes it will bring him and his family some closure.